


the grave (or, things never satisfied)

by lesblep



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Greek Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15750264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesblep/pseuds/lesblep
Summary: Rey rejoins the Resistance. This comes with the unfortunate side effect of learning what family really feels like.Starring the local disaster lesbian, a mechanic, the best pilot in the Resistance, Finn, who has a category all of his own, the one and only Leia Organa, several Force ghosts, and a distinct lack of proper communication.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whimsicalMedley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicalMedley/gifts).



> This one's for you, darling.

When Rey is- ten, maybe, Jakku doesn't use the Galactic Standard of measurement and it's not like Unkar Plutt gives a damn how old she is as long as she can work- she hides in a pile of broken machinery instead of scrubbing filthy metal and doesn't leave it until the sun sets, twisting and untwisting a loop of wire around her wrist like a bracelet. The careful rhythm is comforting, even as the frayed ends scratch at her veins.   
  
She goes back to that pile as many times as she can before it collapses on top of her, scoring a deep scar across her shoulder that aches with phantom pain even now- fiddling with the way circuit boards fit together, screwing materials back into their appropriate slots, learning more by touch than by sight how glass shatters and how those broken pieces fit back together. It gives her something to do, at least, and it keeps her out of trouble, so Plutt lets her sit in the back of his shop for the year, teaching herself how to build things, how to make them run even better when you're done tweaking them. Sometimes he tosses her quarter portions when she fixes something especially well.   
  
It's a living.   
  
Then, when she's twelve, Rey runs out of time. What is probably supposed to be a droid- just garbage, really, everything on Jakku is garbage in one form or another- refuses to respond to any of her expertise, and Plutt gets mad. When Unkar Plutt gets mad, he gets cruel and greedy and grasping, and the next thing Rey knows is she's being tossed out into the desert, stomach growling, and told not to come back until she can fix the thing that got her into this mess in the first place.   
  
She doesn't cry. She dusts herself off, pours out the sand that's been collecting in her shoes, and starts walking. Rey's heard enough from Plutt's customers to know to avoid the Sinking Fields. She marches out of Niima Outpost, spine stiff with confidence until she starts tripping over dunes, and every once in awhile she picks up something shining in the sand, tucking it in the folds of her skirt with appropriately childlike wonder. Seven years later, Rey realises she was lucky she didn't experience a sandstorm that night, or anything equally as dangerous and devastating to a child, until she had spent an entire year living in the crawlspaces of an AT-AT.   
  
It's lying on its side when she finds it, something left over from an age of pain. It reminds her of the sickly creatures that get dragged into Niima, sides heaving with heat-exhaustion. They're hurting badly, she knows somehow, and so is this relic. The only difference is that  _ this _ one was allowed to lay down and die.   
  
It's not easy to break through its armor, so Rey searches for another way in. She passes through a curtain of wiring, unsparking, and finds a nest of animals that someone from another, kinder, planet would call roommates. Rey calls them pests, and chases them from her new home because cruelty and greed and grasping hands is all she has ever known, and gets bitten for her trouble.   
  
(Long-long-ago, or so they say, a bride was bitten just like Rey was, and sent to the darkness, and her groom sang his way down after her. The queen of the dark, with flowers in her hair and her teeth stained pomegranate-red, listened to his song, and wept. Some say it reminded her of herself, a child dancing through a field, caught and dragged down into the dark. Some say she walked into hell like she was coming home. Some say she was chased.   
  
Some say this is not a story about the queen. Some say all stories, in the end, are about queens. Some say it was not the queen, but her husband-the-king who wept. Some say she begged him to show mercy.   
  
Either way, the groom was promised a second chance. He promised, in return, not to look back.   
  
He loved his bride just a bit too much, and looked back, and broke his promise, and she was taken back into the dark, and the queen could not offer another chance this time.   
  
Some say the groom never was allowed back into the darkness, and he mourned the loss of his mortality, and did not forgive himself because he thought that that was what his bride would want. Some say he sang himself into oblivion, and kept singing, and you can still hear him singing when the desert is very-very-quiet.   
  
Some say the bride never forgave him. Some say she sang her own way back up and smacked him across the face for being so stupid. Some say she forgave him but never said so. Some say the lesson was necessary and some say it was not and some say this is not a story children should be told and some say-)   
  
Rey is not a bride, or a groom, or acquainted with any queens, and she is not a very good singer. She does not know this story. What she does know is that she is probably-twelve, and her ankle feels like fire, and her mouth tastes of sand, and she is stranded in the middle of the desert because she has never known kindness, and in attempt to make something her own, she stole kindness from someone else.   
  
Rey should have died. Four simple words, tacked together haphazardly to build an equally simple truth: this girl, not yet the scavenger she would become, was not supposed to survive the bite. She was meant to go down to the darkness, with nobody to sing her back again. Rey should have died.   
  
She did not.   
  
The nest's inhabitants return. Perhaps to devour her, because that is how you survive on Jakku, but they do not find a cooling corpse. They find a mewling whelp, who needs to be protected, who calls herself strong but does not yet realise you can be strong and weak at the same time. They lick the poison away, all sharp teeth and sorrow, regretting the bite in the first place, and Rey wakes up surrounded by warm, trilling creatures who teach her how to forgive.   
  
They, unlike her, know the meaning of family, and for the next few weeks she follows them and learns how to find the shiniest metals not-yet-corroded by sand and time. She learns how to clean those metals without wasting water. She learns how to listen for footsteps, how to wait for the perfect moment to steal food when its owner’s back is turned. She learns everything she knows now, and learns the basics of her future skills.   
  
She learns that her nest-family has an incredibly short lifespan.   
  
Rey does not die, when they do. She buries them, hands scraped raw from digging, and their bodies are specked with human-red blood when she finishes, but they are not devoured by something stronger when they die, because she interfered, because they taught her kindness, because humanity as a whole has a knack for saying 'no'.   
  
Rey does not die during her first sandstorm. She does not die when she falls into a shaft left uncovered in the wreckage of an ancient Star Destroyer, although she does break her ankle. She does not die when a strange man with stranger words tries to hold her down and steal whatever it is she seems to have. Emphasis on 'tries'. She breaks his fingers with the staff she built of scraps, and sends him on his way. She does not die of thirst, or of hunger, or of loneliness. By all accounts, she should’ve, but she doesn’t.   
  
(Sometimes, Rey has never told anyone, she wishes she did. Because at least then she wouldn't have had to see her friends cut down by lightsabres and bullets and blaze and death.)   
  
Her nest-family taught her to forgive, so Rey forgives like a madwoman, unbottled trust in those who stay flowing from her hands. A waste of water, truly, but for a girl raised in the desert she does it anyway, even if it leaves her parched. She forgives Han Solo for leaving them all behind. She forgives Finn for wanting to run away. She tries-  _ tries _ , mind you- to forgive Kylo Ren, to forgive Ben Solo, and nearly ends up dragged into the dark along with him. He no longer deserves to be sung back to life, deserves to remain the shell that he is, and when Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber splits in two, so does her belief in him.

 

But  _ this,  _ dear reader, isn’t the end of her tale.

 

This is the middle.


	2. Chapter 2

Rey’s friends seem to have a nasty habit of falling into comas. First Finn, then General Organa, now the mechanic, Rose. Who’s next? Poe?  _ Chewie _ ?

 

Finn sets a hand on her shoulder, knuckles cracked and dry from how long they’ve been crammed onboard the Falcon. “Rey,” he says, all gentle words and motions, “get some sleep.”

 

“I can't,” she replies. “I feel like this is my fault.” She's referring, of course, to the thirty-ish remaining members of the Resistance, to Rose, to  _ Ren _ . 

 

He frowns, sets a blanket over the back of the chair, and disappears to keep an eye on everyone else, no doubt. Rey watches him go, then passes a hand over the soft fabric, wrapping it around herself like a ragged cape. She preens fondly at the texture, turning back to her work.

 

The hologram spreads before her, projection glitching as it rotates. It’s her self-appointed job to find a new planet for the dregs of the Resistance to make their home base, and it’s not going too well. Yesterday she passed out on the desk and woke up with imprints on her face. Today, she keeps getting distracted. She  _ wants  _ to help, desperately, and she can’t seem to rest unless she tires herself out. 

 

Rey’s scar twinges. Maybe it means something in the Force, maybe it's the last gasp of the connection between her and Ren, or maybe it's just because she's stressed. She reaches over one shoulder, touches the old scar with the very tip of her finger. Blood comes away, soaking through her clothes and inching up her sleeve, staining her skin.

 

“Oh, no,” she says quietly. The broiling red taunts her, curling smokelike. She shuts her eyes tight, two beats, three. Open. The blood is gone again, like it never happened.

 

This is the third time this week she's seen things like this. Maybe someone out there, someone who understands the whole Jedi thing a bit more, can explain her visions, but for now she's just plain old freaked out. Then again, the universe is so bafflingly enormous, and-

 

-and she needs a break. Finn would say the same. Poe would, too, he likes Rey a lot, even if he's busy flying the Falcon most of the time since the autopilot is difficult and needs monitoring to make sure they don't exit lightspeed phased halfway through an asteroid belt. She's been working too hard, and now she's seeing things. Rey rises from her seat, footsteps muffled against the floor. She considers, briefly, visiting the cockpit, visiting Poe and Chewie, but instead walks the other way, towards the makeshift medbay.

 

The door whispers open. Finn is inside, just like she expected him to be. He’s curled into a ball on a chair beside the mechanic's- Rose’s- bed, snoring softly. Rey smiles at him. Her best friend, bleeding heart and all. Not many things belong to her, but this moment, at least, does. Then the pulse of Rose's life signs sync with Rey’s own, quickening beat by beat, and she whirls on the axis of her heel to see the girl- they're both girls, really, caught up in a war of ancient blood- blink awake, gasping.

 

“Hello,” Rey says, for lack of a better way to say _ congratulations on not dying, but bad news, the Resistance is now made up of roughly thirty people, a force user, an ex-trooper, and a Wookie.  _ “I'm Rey. Do you want some water?”

 

Rose nods. Space travel doesn't allow for free-floating liquids, usually, but regulations can jump in a lake (Rey is only recently acquainted with the concept of lakes, and she still finds a thrill in talking so casually about them that you can use them in an insult). She turns to the recycler, huffing when it buzzes loudly to life, and turns back with a glass brimming with dubiously cloudy water. Rose sips at it, coughing afterwards.

 

“Hi, Rey.” She says softly, holding up a hand to shake. Her skin is dry, too, thanks to the whole coma thing, but her grasp is firm enough that it makes up for it. 

 

Rey puts one hand over Rose's, who is beginning to shake under the weight of the glass. “Do you remember what happened on Crait?” She takes the glass and sets it aside.

 

“I- no.” Rose looks frustrated. “Is everything okay?”

 

Rey doesn't reply, pausing when Finn’s head lolls over the back of his chair. He shoots up when he hears voices and clasps his hands to his chest, like the heroine from the one holofilm that they managed to rescue from the garbage compactor about a week ago. “Rose!” he exclaims. “I was  _ so worried _ .” He does that a lot, recently, speaking in italics and jumping octaves for emphasis. It's endearing, and Rose seems to think so too.

 

“ _ Finn, _ ” she shriek-says, and it's no wonder they’re friends. Rey settles into the chair he vacates, rests her chin in her hands. Grins.

 

They crash into each other, meaning Finn launches himself into the gurney for a hug and Rose gets kind of squashed. It's a saccharine reunion, really. Medbay lighting is garbage, but it's obvious that Rose is straining to wrap her arms around Finn's neck, peppering tiny kisses on her friend's face.

 

_ Oh.  _ Rey realises all at once what she should do, snapping to attention. She unfurls from her gargoyle pose in the chair, steps soft and smeared against the floor, and pads out. Unwanted again.

 

The cockpit is Rey's favourite place on the Falcon, she's decided. Bits of electricity whispering through the Force are constantly alive, sparks kissing at her eyelashes when she does a particularly good barrel roll. No barrel rolls tonight, though. Tonight is for-

 

“Rey?” Poe says. Peeks over one shoulder to see her haunting the doorframe. His emotions are so open, she could feel the wave of concern from the other side of the ship.

 

She shakes her head when he says her name a second time, huffs quietly when he pulls her into a lean against his side. For two adults, they do fit rather well in one chair. “Hey, Black Leader.”

 

“Hey, hero.”

 

That's the breaking point tonight. Rey curls up again, sizing herself roughly to Bee-Bee, feet slung over the arm of the captain's chair. “Not a hero,” she says, muffles herself into dark leather. The ship twists around her, metal saying things only she can hear in a language only she knows, calls for tuneups and oil and attention and Poe?

 

Poe makes it all quiet again. He props his chin on her head. “One of those nights, huh.”

 

“I'm not a revolutionary or a hero or the last Jedi,” Rey says, spits, speeds through word after word like it burns her tongue to say, drips jet fuel. “I'm a scavver from Jakku and I made friends with the only person who could've possibly convinced me to leave.”

 

Poe just sounds sad. “You can be multiple things at a time, Rey-”

 

“-And now Rose is awake and Finn's gonna spend  _ even more time with her. _ He's leaving. And it's my fault.”

 

“Finn's not going anywhere,” Poe says. “And Ren would've always been Ren no matter what you did. You're gonna have to let go eventually, Rey,” he squeezes her, “but until then I'll help carry it.”


End file.
